The much anticipated second season of Continuum premieres on Sunday. The show has been a worldwide smash for Showcase and production company Reunion Pictures, but there’s a special connection for Vancouverites. Continuum is shot here, but our hometown also gets to play itself in the time-hopping sci-fi thriller.

In fact, the very seat of global power resides in the Vancouver of 2077. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Starbucks on Robson and Richards, actually, as far as I can tell from the first ever episode, when we saw the atomized Corporate Congress collapse into its own footprint at free fall speed (as these things do) after being attacked by Liber8.

“Truthfully, the idea was location-proof in its inception,” series creator Simon Barry told the Straight on a recent set visit. “It could have been any North American city. When the opportunity came up to shoot in Canada, we just said, ‘Well, we set it in Vancouver and see if anyone says anything.’”

Nobody said anything, and so the Continuum universe was plunked right in your backyard—augmented by the show’s designers with what Barry described as “the present, the past, and then three eras of design into the future, so that it looks like a city with a history, not just like we landed in a city in 2077 where everything looked new.  We even have construction in the future building the next generation. It’s in the background, but it’s there.”

There were also, as Barry elaborated, a “wealth of relevant connections” that suggested Vancouver as a feasible player in the future world order.

“We looked at the Pacific Northwest,” he continuumed, “and the geography, and the kind of high tech connections; the Asia connection; the money; the water, which British Columbia has in abundance; you know all these things started to play as the mythology. If the East Coast should fall, where the power centres would move to in the west, and where the money would be."

This might be more than just idle speculation. "If the ocean levels were to rise 20 or 30 feet, the coastal range provides a natural defence that the East Coast just doesn’t have—it would literally go underwater,” Barry added.

What does he mean by if…?

Continuum series two premieres on Showcase, Sunday (April 21) at 9PM